The Real Cost of Drop-in Compatibility: What I Threw Away Porting markdownlint-cli2 to Rust

I ported markdownlint-cli2 to Rust and matched 264,114 diagnostics on this blog repository byte for byte. The commits that ported 51 rules landed in a single day, but turning that into a tool you could actually swap in took two weeks. A record of giving up a parser 37 times faster, correcting two performance misreadings, and finding 11 more compatibility differences in an adversarial review.